Threads and patterns

Here's a wonderful French blog, Fils et Aiguilles, by an accomplished embroiderer, Yolande. Check her out. 

She introduces a different type of stitching with each post. Infrequent, and all the more welcome. The only tiny drawback is that I want to try, or revisit, every stitching type she mentions. 

Each post appears in three languages including English, no need for translation apps which never get stitching terms right.

Her title means threads and needles, works more rhythmically in French in that order, where English prefers needle and thread for the word order.

It's impossible for a translation to differentiate between fils, plural of fil, meaning thread, and fils, singular, pronounced differently and meaning son. This results in some hilarious versions, as you can imagine, in a context where threads are referred to all over the place.

Then the forecast snow recalls to mind  fractals, the ever-recursive shapes, which basically create the universe.  

I first found out about fractals, the Mandelbrot set, to he exact, incredible mathematical  discovery, (or construct? not sure what term to use), back in the 90s, when the Swiss institution of mathematics seriously involved in fractals used to leave their then brand-new website open to interested non-math people.

I then made quite a bit of fractal-based art at that time,  using a complicated computer set-up at the college where I took classes, puzzled my teachers and won a couple of purchase prizes in exhibits from equally baffled jurors who loved the work while wondering what it was and how it was done.

Like these

Some of these are in corporate and public and private collections, some bust up and collaged into new work. Some probably lying around somewhere, I'm a maker, not a conservator!

Back to the Swiss math institute,  a lot of people caught on to fractals, kept crashing the website, and the math institute regretfully closed it to non faculty or credentialed mathematicians.  

They were very polite, very sorry, but explained they couldn't do international research when their website kept crashing! 

Here are their mathematical fractals, the top left being the Mandelbrot set

You don't have to grasp the mathematical principles to love these shapes. Just Google in fractals and go.

Speaking of how they're everywhere, some of our blogistas have had overnight storms of fractals, this kind

In the past I've cut out some pretty complex paper snowflakes for winter decorations, all given away in the course of teaching. I might make a few to hang in the patio window now that I won't be opening it much in cold weather.

 I'm remembering being an early adopter of conputer assisted art, often fractal based, and having questions from exhibit curators and jurors and visitors about what the heck they were seeing, recalls how it was a whole new concept.

Very hard for people to look at my photographed  abstract images, and grasp that they were not a picture of an object.   No physical object existed, it being an image capture of what was on my screen. It existed only on my ever increasing collection of big floppy disks. Each image took an entire disk.

Since there were only two printers in the country which could print this massive range of color and shape, the nearest in Colorado, my instructors devised a way to install a 35mm camera into the guts of the computer set-up, so you installed the reel of film by touch, and took pix.  This was long before screenshots or scanning were thought of. 

Then I got the film developed at a local photography place. The people working there became fans! They were the first to see how the images appeared as photos and would go see them exhibited. 

There was a lot of misunderstanding of the concept of computer assisted art at that time, even exhibit jurors saying they wouldn't accept it into shows because "a computer made it". I used to explain the computer was just a great big fancy pencil. The artist made the work using it as a tool.

And I still entered my work, describing it as a print, which indeed it was. They accepted it, not realizing that these complex images were in fact created with the help of a computer. I think they were expecting  cartoons or simple graphics or something.

The software had a base ramp (display) of sixteen colors, each of which had the possibility of a million variations of hue, intensity and luminosity. Short version: more options than the human eye can perceive. Even shorter version: heavenly playtime, endless choices.

I worked intensively in computer-aided art for about eighteen months, at which point I was hungry to handle physical materials again, and moved back into monotype making and other tactile work.

Which was just as well, because the college then replaced all the art department PCs with Macs, at that time the graphic industry standard for ad design, so my equipment vanished. 

The faculty were interested in equipping students for careers in advertising, not so much for the fine arts. Probably pressure from the county funders to show employment results.  But they had already done folks like me proud. No complaints here.

When I started this post I thought I'd just show you stitching and snowflakes! Shows what happens when I start thinking.